Churchill, perverted

Winston Churchill’s two pronouncements on democracy are believed to be contradictory, but really aren’t.

In one, he said: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” In the other, Churchill observed that “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

Before deciding whether one statement refutes the other, let’s agree on what Churchill (b. 1874) meant by democracy.

According to Freedom House, the neoconservative thinktank in Washington, D.C., in 2007 the world could boast 123 electoral democracies – up from 40 in 1972 and from zero [sic] in 1900. In other words, just over a century ago even America, never mind what Freedom House doubtless sees as a vestigially tyrannical Europe, didn’t qualify for the ultimate accolade of politics. Democracy then is barely 100 years old.

Now, one suspects that Churchill’s idea of democracy, formed as it was at a time when, according to Freedom House, democracy didn’t exist, differed from Freedom House’s.

Though both a staunch monarchist and a committed parliamentarian, Churchill didn’t believe he was living a double life. To him there was no contradiction in a strong monarchy being balanced by an elected lower house, with the hereditary upper chamber making sure the balance didn’t tip too much to either side.

That was the essence of England’s ancient constitution, one that so many American visitors claim doesn’t exist because it hasn’t been written down. I usually reply that a written constitution is like a prenuptial agreement specifying the frequency of sex: if you have to write it down, you might as well not bother.

To Freedom House, democracy means something un-Churchillian: the best imaginable form of government that shouldn’t just dominate other forms but oust them. Yet Churchill is posthumously co-opted as the champion of this idea, with his first statement above dragged in as support, while the second one is conveniently forgotten.

But Churchill never implied anything quite so false as that and anyway, as we’ve seen, the word democracy meant something entirely different to him. Never did he say that unadulterated, uncontested democracy is the best conceivable form of government.

This, however, has become an article of faith in liberal democratic circles. That fallacy is bandied about with maniacal persistence. Didn’t Churchill say democracy was perfect?

Actually, no, he didn’t. He said that democracy was deeply flawed, although other pure political systems were even more so. And his second pronouncement highlights the principal flaw of democracy: most people aren’t qualified to decide who should govern them.

Democracy hounds are lying when they insist that mankind has never come up with anything better. It has, the first time some 2,500 years ago.

Both Plato and Aristotle looked at the three main political forms they knew, namely monarchy (the rule of one), aristocracy (the rule of minority) and democracy (the rule of majority), and found all of them wanting, if not without each having some good points.

Monarchy, while providing continuity and avoiding partisan squabbles, has a potential for tyranny. Aristocracy, while conducive to competent governance and high culture, has a divisive effect on society. And democracy, while giving every citizen a stake in government, promotes vulgarity, mediocrity and draws into government those unfit to govern (something that’s consonant with Churchill’s second pronouncement).

The great Athenians reached a conclusion that has since been shared by most significant political thinkers: the best political system is a synthetic one, amalgamating all three forms of government. Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Vico, Burke, Canning, Tocqueville, Mill, Kant and assorted Enlightenment thinkers in France and Germany all arrived at this conclusion, if from different angles.

Cicero referred to such mixed government as res publica, “public affairs”, and Churchill would have recognised it as the best form of government ever tried. Alas, by 1947, when he talked about democracy being the least of many evils, modernity had won the glossocratic battle, and, by way of shorthand, Churchill tacitly agreed to describe our government as a democracy.

(The word ‘republicanism’ now means virulent anti-monarchism, which is yet another example of modernity playing fast and loose with political concepts.)

In fact, the idea of res publica was best realised in the England of, and before, Churchill’s birth and youth. However, that England, and especially her contemporaneous America, should have alerted advocates of a mixed constitution to the need for eternal vigilance. For, in an increasingly secular world obsessed with the dubious concept of inalienable human rights, the democratic element may assume dictatorial powers. So it has transpired.

Democracy hounds opened the floodgates and modernity rushed in, sweeping aside even what was worth keeping and littering the landscape with the flotsam of petty ideas and puny aspirations. Sooner or later the flood was bound to drown every institution of our traditional polity.

Democracy had to follow inexorably, first in America, even if this wasn’t the Founders’ original design. Many of them, John Adams specifically, were horrified when observing the chicken hatched by the egg they had laid. In 1806 Adams wrote: “I once thought our Constitution was a quasi or mixed government, but they had made it… a democracy.”

This, by his correct if belated judgement, had a disastrous effect not only on America but on the whole world. In 1811 Adams rued: “Did not the American Revolution produce the French Revolution? And did not the French Revolution produce all the calamities and desolation of the human race and the whole globe ever since?” Laudable hindsight, but only hindsight nonetheless.

In common with other sage men, Adams saw every idea in its dynamic development, not as a perpetual stasis. He could foresee where things were going, although even he couldn’t predict the destination they reached 200 years later.

Liberal democracy has since stopped being an idea and become an ideology, which negates both its liberal and democratic elements. In fact, liberal democracy has eerily acquired many features normally associated with communism.

One such feature is its eschatology, the belief that, once liberal democracy has emerged universally victorious, mankind will no longer travel. It will have arrived. That idea was encapsulated in Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book The End of History, a reaction to the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union.

That simpleminded book showed a lamentable ignorance of the Soviet Union, the West and indeed history, but that didn’t matter. Fukuyama put in a nutshell the eschatological aspect of the dominant Western cult, that of the inevitable and universal triumph of liberal democracy. That’s what modernity wanted to hear and it applauded.

Liberal democrats and communists are like Orwell’s animals: converging in their overarching views and only arguing about the number of legs. One feature both ideologies share is their doctrinaire intolerance.

Each of them is certain it possesses the ultimate truth, which makes any disagreement at best frivolous and at worst subversive. If it’s frivolous, it must be ignored or shouted down. If it’s subversive, it must be punished.

Thus, under both communism and liberal democracy, the range of permissible public inquiry gets steadily narrower. Observing this, a communist may shrug with indifference, but a liberal democrat really shouldn’t. After all, the founding tenet of his creed is liberty, made up of various components, with freedom of speech paramount.

Thus communism and liberal democracy vindicate Hegel’s dialectics, specifically his idea of the unity of opposites. They also prove the inadequacy of our political taxonomy, where almost every term gets to mean something different from – and, in the case of liberalism, opposite to – its original definition.

In my 2006 book How the West Was Lost, I propose a simpler classification, identifying two overarching cultural types, Westman and Modman. The former was the product of Christendom destroyed and supplanted by the latter.

Modman was brought into existence by what Ortega y Gasset called “the revolt of the masses”, the mainly negative impulse to destroy the traditional Western civilisation. That type soon bifurcated into two subtypes I call ‘nihilist’, ideally represented by communism, and ‘philistine’, championed by liberal democracy.

Neither subtype exists in unalloyed purity: the nihilist shares many of the philistine’s aspirations and vice versa, with only the balance of the two being different. The two subtypes have a tendency to converge, something we are witnessing at the moment, with Western liberalism growing more and more illiberal by the day.

It’s a common deterministic fallacy to insist that, because things happen, they were bound to happen. I find it impossible to countenance any form of determinism or even the idea (common to communists and liberal democrats alike) that history unfolds according to some inexorable laws.

However, some things make other things likely to happen, even if not predetermined. The shrill, intolerant ‘cancel’ culture is that opposite of liberalism to which it’s for ever attracted. Therefore, it was predictable, if not unavoidable.

Churchill died in 1965, when the world was already dramatically different from the one in which he was born, raised and formed. It’s now more different still, and I doubt Churchill would like it if he were blessed with an implausible longevity. He’d like it even less that his offhand remarks are held up as justification for what he’d detest.